Why This Matters

You wrote "research skills" into the ATL box of your unit planner because the task involved research, and honestly, that's about as far as the thinking went. Your students then went off to "research" their topic, and half of them came back with the first three results from a search engine, no sense of which sources were reliable, and no idea how to tell a strong source from a weak one. You never actually taught them how to do that. You just assumed that if you called it a research task, research would happen. This is the single most common way ATL becomes a box you tick rather than something you teach.

Understand the Idea

ATL stands for Approaches to Learning — the MYP's term for the transferable skills that sit underneath every subject: things like organizing your time, evaluating sources, collaborating in a group, or communicating an argument clearly. These skills are grouped into broad categories with more specific skill clusters underneath them — for example, categories that cover thinking skills, research skills, communication skills, social skills, and self-management skills.

📌 Official source: The exact category names, clusters, and specific skill indicators are set out by the IB and are refined periodically. Treat any specific list in this article as illustrative; confirm the current official categorization in your subject guide or MYP: From Principles into Practice.

The core idea behind ATL is that these skills don't develop automatically just because a task requires them. A task can "require" research skills the same way a swimming pool "requires" swimming — simply being near the task doesn't teach the skill. What ATL asks you to do is different: identify which specific skill a task genuinely demands, then actually teach it, on purpose, with time set aside for it, before or during the task that requires it.

This is where skill demand analysis comes in — the practice of looking at a task closely and asking, concretely, what a student has to be able to do to succeed at it, rather than accepting the vague label the task seems to wear. "Research skills" is a label. "Evaluating whether a website is a credible source before citing it" is a demand — specific enough that you could teach a twenty-minute lesson on exactly that.

The other half of the idea is transfer — the same one from Article 6. A skill genuinely taught in one subject should be usable in another. If a student learns to evaluate source credibility in Individuals & Societies, that skill should transfer to a Science research task or a Language and Literature essay, and part of your job is making that transfer visible to students by naming the skill the same way each time, rather than each teacher inventing their own private vocabulary for it.

Once you've identified the real skill demand, the practical shift is small but significant: instead of assuming the skill and handing out the task, you carve out one explicit chunk of lesson time — sometimes as short as twenty minutes — to directly teach the skill, model it, and give students a chance to practice it with feedback before they're expected to use it independently.

See It in Practice

Weak version: A Grade 8 Individuals & Societies teacher assigns a task: "Research the causes of a historical conflict of your choice and present your findings." The ATL box in the unit planner says "research skills." No lesson time is set aside to teach anything about research; the assumption is that students already know how to do this because they've "done research before." In practice, students spend their independent work time skimming the first search results, mixing reliable and unreliable sources without noticing the difference, and producing presentations with confidently stated but shaky claims.

Strong version, after skill demand analysis: The same teacher stops and asks: what does this task actually require, specifically? Not "research" in general, but the ability to look at a source and judge whether it's credible enough to cite — who wrote it, when, with what evidence, and what possible bias. That's the real demand: source evaluation, a specific cluster within the broader research skill category.

So before assigning independent research time, the teacher runs a twenty-minute lesson. She puts three sources on the board about the same historical event: a peer-reviewed academic article, a personal blog post with strong opinions and no citations, and a museum's educational website. Students work in pairs to rank the three by credibility and justify their ranking against a short list of criteria the teacher provides (authorship, evidence, date, purpose). The class discusses disagreements together. Only after this twenty minutes does independent research begin — and now students have a concrete checklist to apply, not a vague instruction to "use good sources."

The task didn't change. The content didn't change. What changed is that the skill the task actually demanded got taught, not assumed — and the teacher can now point to evidence (the paired ranking activity) that the skill was addressed, not just required.

🧠 Teacher insight: The twenty-minute lesson above is small on purpose. Explicit ATL instruction doesn't need to consume a whole class period to be real — it needs to be deliberate, visible, and followed by a chance to practice with feedback.

Apply It

Take one task from a unit you're currently teaching or about to teach — ideally one where you've previously just written a skill category in the planner and moved on.

🧭 Planning decision: List everything a student must actually be able to do, step by step, to succeed at this task. Be concrete — not "communicate effectively" but "structure a paragraph with a claim, evidence, and explanation," not "collaborate" but "divide a task fairly and check in on a partner's progress midway through."

Once you have the full list, circle every item that has never actually been explicitly taught to this group of students — not assumed, not modeled once in passing, but taught with dedicated time and a chance to practice.

That circled list is your concrete artefact. Pick the single most important circled item and sketch, in two or three sentences, what a short lesson segment teaching it directly would look like — who does what, for how long, with what example. This becomes the missing piece you insert into your unit before the task, not instead of it.

📎 Download: The ATL Planning Tool gives you a structured demand-analysis table plus prompts for turning a circled skill into a short, concrete teaching segment.

Avoid This

Symptom: your unit planner lists an ATL skill category, but no lesson in the unit is actually about that skill. This is the classic tick-box pattern. Fix: run the demand analysis above and insert one dedicated teaching segment before the task that needs it.

Symptom: you named the skill too broadly — "thinking skills" — and can't say what you'd actually put on the board to teach it. A skill you can't picture teaching in twenty minutes probably isn't specific enough yet. Fix: narrow it to a specific cluster or indicator, the way "research skills" narrowed to "source evaluation" above.

Symptom: you teach the skill once, in one subject, and assume it transfers automatically to other subjects. Transfer isn't automatic; it has to be named consistently. Fix: use the same skill vocabulary your students hear in other subjects, and explicitly reference it — "remember the source credibility checklist from Individuals & Societies? Use it here."

⚠️ Common trap: Confusing "the task requires this skill" with "I taught this skill." A task can require swimming without anyone having taught anyone to swim.

Check Yourself

Yes or no:

  1. Can you name the specific skill (not just the broad category) your current task demands?
  2. Have you set aside dedicated lesson time to teach that specific skill, separate from assigning the task?
  3. Do you have evidence — an activity, a checklist students used, a discussion — that the skill was actually addressed?

Continue Learning

→ Next step: Article 10 — Inquiry in MYP: A Stance, Not a Free-for-All, where you'll decide how much structure to provide as students apply the skills you've just taught. Download: ATL Planning Tool. 📌 Official source: check your current subject guide or MYP: From Principles into Practice for the authoritative current ATL categories and skill clusters.